Scheduled Backups of Home Directory

[Gregory Piñero]

I want to start running scheduled backups of my home directory.  I
have my eye on writing a bash script to mount my second hard drive
(ext3 format) and then run rsync on /home.

Here are the questions I'm having:
1. I'm thinking mount and maybe rsync of /home involve sudo.
a. Is that true?
b. How can I schedule/automate a script that needs root privledges?

2. Is there a way to tell the rsync command to exclude directories?
a. It's no big deal if I can't, I'm just curious since I obviously
don't care about the trash folders, etc.

3. What file changes detections method is best, checksum, time, or
something else?  I think these are options?

Here's my bash script so far in hopes you'll have some feedback:
sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hdc1 /mnt/backup_drive/
rsync -ac /home/ /mnt/backup_drive

Much thanks in advance.

-- 
Gregory Piñero
Chief Innovation Officer
Blended Technologies
(www.blendedtechnologies.com)